The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

Humanity lives in its fiction.

My poor life This shawl Frayed on strongboxes full of gold I roll along with Dream And smoke And the only flame in the universe